Alexander Knysh

The Muslim ascetic-mystical tradition, or “Sufism,” is often considered by both outsiders and insiders to be the most tolerant trend in Islam today, the perfect facilitator in a constructive inter-confessional dialogue between the Muslim world and the West. The vicissitudes of Sufism’s evolution across time and space is the subject of Alexander Knysh’s book project. The author approaches Sufism not as a self-sufficient, self-reproducing and self-regulating ding an sich, but as part and parcel of the complex fabric of Islamic societies in their historical development. The book explores Sufism’s major components such as: (i) Teachings (discourses), both hegemonic and counterhegemonic, stabilizing and destabilizing; (ii) Practices, defined by the teachings (discourses) and instrumental in the production and maintenance of a certain lifestyle, cosmology, and social order; (iii) A community of intellectual and, even more so in this case, spiritual commitment that constitutes a source (and occasionally, the source) of identity/subjectivity for its followers; (iv) A set of institutions that ensures the continuity of the Sufi stream of Islam; (v) Leaders, who interpret the foundational ideas (or, rather, their abstracts), supervise rituals, and determine the overall direction of the religious tradition that they represent and cultivate. 

The author’s principal aim is to explore all of these dimensions of Sufism without sliding into either apology or hypercriticism of the subject(s) examined. He discusses how medieval Sufi masters appropriated the apologetic discourses of other Muslim “tradition-builders,” e. g., the founders of the Islamic legal schools, hadith transmitters, litterateurs, grammarians, philosophers, and theologians, in order to legitimize their own beliefs and way of life. He then proceeds to examine the complex and often puzzling  ways in which the elitist (esoteric) spirituality  of Sufism has “exteriorized” itself  in a profusion of fellowships (brotherhoods or tariqas/silsilas), brick-and-mortar institutions (khanqahs, zawiyas,ribats) and  shrines of popular Sufi masters (awliya’, or “saints”), thereby becoming a major factor in the life of Muslim communities world-wide. The process of Sufism’s institutionalization and its flexible adaptation to changing geopolitical circumstances is in the focus of the proposed study. It also explores the role of individual Sufi masters and Sufi lodges in “the vernacularization of Islam” in both its heartlands and on its borderlands during the Middle Ages and in modern times.

In the recent decades, leaders of Sufi communities have managed to avail themselves of, and creatively re-adjust, Sufi ideas and practices to keep Sufism relevant to the aspirations and tastes of modern-day men and women in both the Muslim world and in the West. Finally, the author explores the reasons for ideological and physical attacks on Sufism by various “fundamentalist”/Salafi /jihadi groups that hold it responsible for the plight and subjugated position of Islam and the Muslims in today’s world. He argues that in the past century and a half Sufism has fallen victim to its own success, creating a situation in which attempts to challenge the socio-political status quo by various oppositional forces almost inevitably entail an attack on its most visible (and controversial) symbol as Sufi Islam has become. The study shows how modern-day Sufis have managed to hold their own in the face these incessant attacks, although in their struggle against their attackers they have been forced to seek the help of state authorities. The uneasy and frequently re-negotiated relationships between Sufis and the state and Sufis and their detractors of various stripes are examined in the last chapters of the study.